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Chapter 4: Conclusion
The year I started teaching was the same year that reggaeton, a Spanish-language relative of dancehall and hip-hop, crossed over to English-speaking audiences in the U.S. Many of my students, especially a handful of Puerto Rican and Dominican boys, were learning to produce reggaeton music on their personal computers. Using the same FruityLoops software as the young snap enthusiasts from Chapter 3, they made songs on their home computers and occasionally brought tracks to school on burned CD-Rs.
Listening to a set of new tracks one afternoon, I complimented their steady improvement and asked about reference materials that they used to learn more about their tools. In addition to tutorials they found on the web by way of Google searches, the boys showed me a stapled stack of black and white print outs. There was very little text on the paper, instead, they bore diagrams of common reggaeton beat patterns rendered with dashes, Xs, and plus signs from the ASCII set. The boys explained that they were using the "comments" sections on their MySpace pages to share knowledge about programming reggaeton drums. By rendering the patterns in plain ASCII text, they could easily copy and paste the patterns from one MySpace page to the next.
The history of hip-hop culture is a full of similarly elegant reuses of media technologies yet this participants in hip-hop are rarely thought of as technical innovators. Reflections on hip-hop's technical past often imply an accidental discovery of machines like the turntable and sampler when, in fact, practitioners carefully selected their tools in search of unique affordances. As hip-hop entrepreneurs began to take a major stake in the pop industry at the end of the 1990s, some of these tools and practices were validated and calcified such that they now tend to obscure the on-going innovations of younger hip-hop practitioners. Soulja Boy represents a lively culture of young artists expressing themselves wholly through the creative use of digital media technologies on the internet.
Widespread stereotyping of hip-hop participants has a significant effect on the everyday lived experience of young black men in the U.S. In countless cases, these young people are collectively referred to as the "hip-hop generation" and are marked by the limited representations of hip-hop that proliferate in the most highly capitalized media channels. As a result, an empowering opportunity is lost to credit young black men with pioneering the material creativity that now characterizes life on the web. While it will be difficult to interrupt the constant collapse of young black men in general and hip-hop practitioners in particular, altering the stereotype of the hip-hop practitioner to reflect a spirit of creative innovation may liberate and inspire young black men marked by this stereotype to foreground their own engagement with media technology.
The first step to altering these damaging stereotypes is to recognize hip-hop as a popular culture rather than a genre of pop music. Hip-hop culture is one of creative competition that relies on the raw material of its past for the creation of its present. These new artifacts, in turn, frequently bear evidence of their construction in a manner that will encourage further intervention. The most relevant of these artifacts and practices can migrate across multiple social, commercial, and technological contexts. Some of these are granted a high degree of visibility to outside observers as they circulate through the conventional pop marketplace, but within hip-hop culture, they represent incomplete segments of an on-going discourse.
Hip-hop critics tend to focus on the lyrics and video imagery that are broadcast through conventional television and radio channels. While these well-funded commodities have a powerful effect on the culture of hip-hop, they represent only its most conventional manifestation. Textual analysis fails to capture the creative practices and unusual modes of consumption that floursh among hip-hop fans. The mixtape economy predates the incorporation of hip-hop artifacts by the dominant media industries and has since maintained alternate social norms, commercial practices, and technologies for the production and duplication of sound recordings. The geographically diverse, socially rich narratives of hip-hop mixtape history are all but absent in a critique that relies solely on the content of conventional pop commodities.
One reason that innovative practices like those of the mixtape economy remain largely invisible is that hip-hop is disproportionately constrained by recent legislation among other popular cultures. The changes to copyright law implemented by the Copyright Act of 1976 and extended by the Digital Millenium Copyright Act of 1998 effectively render the creative reuse of existing cultural material presumptively illegal. As such, the day-to-day creativity of many hip-hop practitioners is subject to state-backed discipline despite being well within the bounds of hip-hop social norms. Commercial opportunities are further constrained by widespread consolidation in the media industries effected in part by the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Negative hip-hop stereotypes remain unchallenged in part because unjust legislation effectively criminalizes and marginalizes hip-hop's most innovative practitioners.
After the commercial success of 50 Cent's incorporation of mixtape practices, pop industry stakeholders combed through cities formerly marginalized by the exclusive focus on New York and Los Angeles in traditional media channels. The sudden capitalization of regional music from cities like Oakland, Houston, and Memphis brought a broad diversification of the sounds, styles, and accents heard on commercial radio and TV. Attending this rise of Southern hip-hop was an revelation on the part of the media industry stakeholders that hip-hop discourse had largely moved into online spaces.
Soulja Boy's savvy exploitation of social-networking and media-sharing websites enabled him to bring a slice of what S. Craig Watkins calls the "digital underground" to traditional media channels. By championing the everyday creativity of the "Crank Dat" remix phenomenon while circulating new pop commodities like the ringtone and digital download, Soulja Boy managed to achieve considerable commercial gains without alientating the popular culture from which he emerged. In spite of low expectations from critics, Soulja Boy continues to creatively engage new media technologies with the same competitive spirit of innovation that has long driven hip-hop culture.
The stereotype that young black men are less technically abled than their peers in other social groupings accompanies poor representation of young black men in the growing fields science and technology. (DiSalvo 1) In spite of ample evidence that these young people are among the most highly engaged with new media technologies, they are not transferring skills earned in that area to traditional forms of employment. Bridging this gap requires mentorship by adults who engage with the technical history of hip-hop culture. They may understand how to operate new media technologies but young people need the guidance of caring adults to help them understand the social context in which these technologies circulate. Soulja Boy's sober response to Ice-T's insults make this need explicit,
"Instead of dissing us, help us!"